“I try to keep a clear distance from the subject. I never want to say that I understand or somehow know the subject. In fact, it's more that I don't know."
Taryn Simon
The Neue Nationalgalerie is showing the exhibition “Taryn Simon. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters”. It presents the artist's new body of work of the same name individually and for the first time in a presentation specially created for this purpose.
Taryn Simon (*1975 in New York, lives and works there) became internationally known with her series of works “The Innocents”. In it, the photographer portrayed people mistakenly convicted of violent crimes at the respective alleged crime scene. After dedicating herself to the hidden and inaccessible places and forbidden things of American society in the two subsequent work groups “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” and “Contraband”. , she now turns to extraordinary family trees and their associated stories with a meticulously researched and impressively dedicated photographic body of work.
For A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2011), Simon traveled around the world over a period of four years and compiled an archive that was as self-contained as it was intuitive in its selection, which explored the relationships between chance, origin and other components of fate .